13英寸笔记本电脑大全

Something that has recently annoyed the Community over and over (you did mention it but I think there has to be an answer for it):

LLMs in the public network

There were multiple attempts of you (the company, not any CMs specifically) trying to integrate some LLM that generates text displayed to users. Notable examples of that are the recent Answer Assistent or the Formatting Assistant but my answer isn't just about these experiments/features but more about the sentiment.

These features are generally received very badly by the community. The Moderation strike (that started before the formatting assistant which was released during the strike) showed that pretty well.

There is a rift between you (the company) and the community. Whenever you start an experiment or publish a feature related to LLMs, that rift grows bigger. You can work towards connecting with us (the community) in different ways (e.g. with the Community Asks sprints) but these efforts are undermined as soon as we hear about the newest idea about integrating LLMs into the public network.

So, I am suggesting cutting any LLMs that generate text and display it to users from the public network. I am not saying you shouldn't use machine learning for anything there (hint improving duplicate detection would probably be received well) but sending raw LLM output leads to many issues (there's a reason why most sites don't want it) so - please just stop with it. Please don't integrate LLMs just for the sake of integrating LLMs. If you have a problem you need to solve with ML models, you can try that but don't take a "solution" (LLMs) and look for problems for them.

Unsolicited experiments and unfinished products

OK, let's be serious. We, "the community", cannot expect to be consulted about every little feature or action that company wants to implement/take. But, at the same time, it is not unreasonable to hope for some meaningful conversations about more elaborated ones.

Obviously, a lot is involved in what, how, and when a certain feature is pursued. But without soliciting feedback early on, chances are that you'll end up with something that is not even a minimum viable product. It is also a waste to not consult a community that has more experience using your product than you, a lot of them are as experienced (if not more) as your developers, and are happy to offer their help for free. I'll go over some recent examples^*:

• Comment Experiment of Stack Overflow: This feature is actually somewhat well-received (I am personally not fond of it). But by the time you've announced it, you were so close to the finish line that had to release it with very little changes due to the feedback you've received. Now, userscripts are broken, UI/UX is sub-optimal, and the feature will probably get tossed.

• Discussions: From the very beginning, this hasn't been my favorite or others. It was advertised as an alternative for Chat, to add searching capabilities and bring humans to the forefront (whatever that means). Yet, it was released with a buggy UI, no search, got expanded before any data was shared about its success, and ended up infested with spam and low quality posts. If this experiment wasn't expanded before getting necessary updates, you could've had something good, at least useful to some of the users. But rushing it only caused greater pain.

Nobody would want to kill a feature that they worked on for quite a while just a day after its release. So, you'll end up dragging these for a while, wasting more resources on them, and then eventually letting go.

It is wishful thinking, but I hope we can cut the number of uninformed "experiments" and instead focus on many many feature requests that are years and years old, or at least do a better job evaluating the features before investing significant time and resources on them.

_{* I left out Answer Bot since that will get discussed by others, and is not just about cutting something out. It is also about hopping off the AI hype train.}

The idea that we need to get more users to sign up

Many tech companies doggedly pursue higher user counts as a metric of success. But what we need isn't more user accounts, it's more user activity. More questions, more answers, more edits, more voting, etc. That isn't solved by sticking a giant sign-up modal in the face of every casual anonymous browser. I'd argue that giant sign-up modals would drive people away, thus decreasing activity.

Instead of trying to get every browser to create an account, why not just... let them browse? Let them poke around, read answers, click links, and generally see what we have to offer. Then, when they want to do something (i.e. start being active), whether that's voting or asking a question, prompt them to create an account. In this way, making an account is presented as the solution to the user's problem/desire: they need to make an account to do X.

At this point, they've clicked a button to actively do something, and so the pop-up is less of a surprise. We already have plenty of these prompts: if an anonymous user tries to vote, follow, comment, etc. Stepping back from encouraging account creation for the sake of account creation won't stop people from making an account if they need one to participate. It's not hard to create an account if someone wants one. Just... please wait until they want one.

The use of reputation as an indication of experience with the moderation of the site

Unlike Spevacus, I don't support totally removing reputation. As they said, the entire network is built off that system.

However, certainly some of the "hats" reputation wears should be removed.

Most glaringly, reputation is used as an indication of your experience with moderation of the site. But... this often isn't the case. A user with over a million rep flooded the site with thousands of answers against policy, and every so often I see users with hundreds of thousands of reputation post spam/non-answers or robo-review. While these users may have plenty of expertise (or just answered a lot of popular questions), they clearly don't know that much about the moderation of the site.

Meanwhile, there are also plenty of users who know a lot about the moderation of the site, but who don't have expertise in the topic of the site, so aren't very high-rep.

This is a problem. Subject matter expertise does not indicate knowing how to moderate well. That's why moderators are elected, and being a moderator isn't a rep-based privilege.

So, what does indicate that a user knows what they are doing moderation-wise?

Well, we could start with helpful flags. Currently, users gain more flags for the helpful flags they raise, but that's as far as this goes.

• What if, say, users with a long history of making many and very accurate recommended closure flags were granted the closing privilege, rather than basing it on rep?
• How about if Low Quality Posts/Low Quality Answers was based on a history of useful and accurate VLQ/NAA flags?
• Or if the edit privilege was granted to users with a history of good suggested edits?
• For delete votes, they could be based of a history of helpful flagging for deletion.
• How about if the ability for protecting questions was granted to users with a history of helpful requests for protection?

We could keep going here, and we should. The best way to ensure that the site has many people helping to moderate and that they know what they're doing is to base moderation privileges off of a history of knowing what you're doing.

The limit for gaining reputation for suggested edits.

SE is designed as an information repository, including other people cleaning up and refining that information. Editing is just as much a part of keeping that repository intact as posting, and needs to be better recognized overall, but one of the first steps should be cutting the 1,000 rep limit for what you can gain from suggested edits. If you've submitted 500 approved suggested edits, chances are you can also submit 1,000, and at that point (really long before) you should definitely be able to earn the privilege to edit unilaterally based on your previous activity.

Remove the per-site varying daily spam flag limit

Tl;dr either have one limit for spam flags across all sites (castable anywhere) or have one limit applied to all sites (if my limit is x on SO, it's also x on every other site).

Background

The concept seems reasonable: more experience with flags means you got more flags, but that has issues with spam in practice

While a some sites may have slightly different rules on self-promotion, unlike an off-topic flag, no site expertise is required to know this is spam:

Score pro Loan App Customer" Care Helpline Number??))+91-5551239876 @! 5551239876-??Calhh

Score pro Loan App Customer" Care Helpline Number??))+91-5551239876 @! 5551239876-??Calhh Score pro Loan App Customer" Care Helpline Number??))+91-5551239876@! 5551239876-??Calhh th

_{Post by andncn Jxjfj on Super User licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, with the phone number changed.}

Sure, this one's from SU. But it's still be spam on AU. Or MSE. Or SF.

Proposal

I propose that the "max allowable spam flags per day per site" is the same for all sites, and it's calculated based on your network-wide flagging history.

A slight variation on this is to remove the "per site" entirely, meaning "you have n flags today, and you may use them anywhere. Want to cast them all on SO? Great! Want to split them between SU and SF? Great"

Get rid of 12 out of 13 of all those different homepages, leaving one to customize

I brought this up before several times, and unfortunately nobody had any idea what I was talking about (this is part of the problem). I'll try to explain again. See the left sidebar? There's "Home" and there's "Questions" and there's "Unanswered". Each of those pages has different tabs, some of which are slightly different (e.g., downvoted post filtering on "Home") and some of which are duplicates. There are maybe 13 views total per site, though some sites have more. It is not obvious how to navigate this, which has lead to:

• Vandalism and spam sitting around because it scored -4 or lower and nobody was using the "active but includes downvotes" view. (You're never told that downvotes affect certain pages.)
  • The same but it was a downvoted post (e.g., on meta) that people actually wanted to see. (MSE's homepage was changed to prevent this from happening but it still happens everywhere else.)
• Some sort of cult worship of the homepage where we can't bump more than 5 things every day, lest other people lose all access to recent Q&A
• Complaints about the Community bot bumping stuff
• Everything is a list of questions, making it harder to appreciate new answers

Now, there's a project changing the homepage already on SO, but this has not been well received because it's showing people stuff that's not relevant to them or something. We should give a good default view for those who haven't made their own (perhaps chosen by moderators and the community of each site) but let's not lose the power we currently have to see different lists of questions.

I want to be able to customize the homepage (i.e., where I go when I click the logo meta.stackexchange.com) and only have the tabs I want, some of which I made myself. I want more options, like filtering out edits or Community bumps.

Honestly I can't remember how the "New Nav" worked exactly but it was close to what I want because it was on the homepage and was easy to access:

I think there are exciting ways this could be expanded. For example, on some social media sites, user-created algorithms can be voted on, so the most useful can rise to the top. (Look up Bluesky feed generators.)

The 'very low quality' flag on questions, at least in its current form.

There is no consistent guidance on how users should use this flag on questions, or how moderators should handle them. Some will just close the question, marking the flag helpful, others will say only flag as 'very low quality' if the question needs to be immediately deleted, yet others will say not to use the 'very low quality' flag on questions at all ever.

The flag pushes questions into Low Quality Posts, or Triage, which then either results in closure directly or the question going to Close Votes, which could have been accomplished already via a close vote/flag.

The flag description is somewhat vague:

This question has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

What constitutes salvageable through editing? Arguably any closable question for a reason that cannot be easily fixed (by the author or community) is unsalvageable, but again, we already have close flags/votes for that.

I am not saying this flag on questions has to go, but the current form is quite useless, and needs serious revision of not being removed entirely. For example, the flag could be designated for questions that need to be deleted by a moderator immediately (posts that just have to go but are not immediately spam or abusive), and that is the policy enforced network-wide.

Remove reputation requirement to observe most privileges in action

Here is the thing - there is the old Internet wisdom of "lurk moar". An ancient incantation instructing newbies that they can observe the system to understand the system.

This is not really possible with the Stack Exchange sites. You get drip-fed privileges which is fair^* - users do not need to be able to do everything from the get-go. However, the way the system works also makes it opaque what actually happens. In practice, a user can be on the site for months, or years, and not have a clue how things operate. Many users believe "admins" rule over the place and enforce their will by closing and/or deleting questions. However, most of the times closure is done by regular users, deletion may not even be done by a user.

At least for me, it was jarring getting access to new site mechanics. Because suddenly, you get an upvote and you get a whole thing you can do that you never had before. And you have no observation how it was used. Like closure - you cannot see close votes until you can vote to close. You did not have the opportunity to observe the system before you were made part of it. Same with the review queues.

In most cases, I see no reason to hide these site mechanics. A user with access to see review queues but not do actions in the review queues is only going to be more informed. And probably better prepared when they eventually get the review privilege.

Not everything needs to be exposed. The 10k/25k stats for example. They are not even site mechanics.

The network nominally prides itself on how community-driven it is. But it hides how community-driven it is from new users. And many new users take the wrong assumption then, that some single entity is haunting them. Not that different users on the system are actually doing a lot of the stuff.

^* There are separate discussions to be had whether we even need this to be rep-based. I am really into the idea of removing rep requirement. But this will not be part of my answer. If rep is removed from privileges, I think the answer should still stand.

Maybe, just maybe, remove/cut down/reduce ... the special treatment of Stack Overflow.

You know about the many smaller, lovely sites that are islands of expert knowledge. But it seems like most of the focus is on Stack Overflow, your flagship site. I am not saying you should ignore the needs of Stack Overflow but I think you should also work on what's needed for smaller sites.

Let's take a look at a few major efforts that were focused on Stack Overflow:

• The Staging Ground. It is only available on Stack Overflow even though some other sites would love to have some support for similar things (e.g. Code Golf and Worldbuilding have their own sandboxes). These sites could greatly benefit from having the option (but this decision should be made by the communities of the corresponding sites and not be forced upon any site) and be sufficiently configurable to be actually useful for these sites. See also this MSE answer by pxeger, this MSE question by Rebecca J. Stones or this chat message from VLAZ
• Discussions. While this was generally not that well received, it was made available only on Stack Overflow.
• Collectives. Similar to Discussions, these were released only for Stack Overflow.

Maybe show some love to the needs of smaller sites.

The usual upfront: This post is the opinion of balpha-the-person, not balpha-the-company-representative. It's not representing the opinions or policies of Stack Overflow.

By the way, am I putting this disclaimer here because the company doesn't want me to say any of this? Absolutely not. The company is actually okay if we express our own opinions. They just want us to be very clear about that fact when we do, so that you don't read "Stack Overflow says ..." in the press the next day. I think that's fair.

I believe that the biggest thing we need to cut from all of it (from the product, from the processes, from the way of thinking on both the company and the community side), is the disregard of the human element.

From the product

A defining trait of the Stack Exchange model has always been the understanding that "it's about the post, not the person". We tell people that a downvote isn't about the author but the content. We discourage salutations and thank yous because we consider them noise.

This makes things easy, because we don't have to consider the messiness that is human experience.

There is solace in objectivity.

Aspiring photographers love to obsess over sharpness and "correct" exposure because it's (kinda) objectively measurable, unlike fluffy concepts like good composition, interesting subjects, or simply "a good photo".

Programmers like discussing cyclomatic complexity because it's an objectively defined concept, while "readable and understandable code" is not.

There is solace in objectivity, and Stack Overflow takes that to the extreme.

To be fair, over the years we have actually made many concessions to human nature. There's Meta, because navel gazing and discussion about the site is just something that people want to do. There's comments, because we realized that in a system with real humans, "questions and answers only, please" is not a realistic thing. There's the Third Place because sometimes humans just want to hang out and chat. But there's also more recent stuff like the Staging Ground, which I see as an acknowledgement of the fact that not all Stack Overflow journeys start equal, because people are diverse.

But despite those, the philosophy of extreme objectivity is still rampant, and it's what gives Stack Overflow its reputation of being unwelcoming. And sure, we can blame individual users for having an attitude to newcomers, but matter of fact is: We teach them that attitude!

The sentence "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" is a joke, poking fun at lack of empathy and nuance. Except on Stack Overflow. Here, this sentence is a guiding philosophy, and we've built it that way.

So, am I saying that we should just stop with demanding facts, specific questions, low noise? No.

But we must find ways for achieving those things while still acknowledging that behind that 32x32 pixel avatar is a human, somewhere in the world, novice or experienced, hobbyist or professional, and each with their own interests, preferences, and personality traits.

In my response to "What's on your mind?" I wrote that back when Stack Overflow was created, people used the internet in a much more transactional way than they do today.

The internet of 2025, for better or for worse, is a place where humans live. They don't want to leave their humanity at the door.

From the company's way of thinking

Remember what I wrote above? I even put it in italics.

There is solace in objectivity, and Stack Overflow takes that to the extreme.

Oh boy, is that doubly true for how we work as a company. For the past 10+ years, we should have been developing a vision for how Stack Overflow can evolve, and then work towards that vision by making decisions, executing on them, and iterating. Instead, we invented new metrics that we sought to improve, built things that we thought would achieve that, measured a bunch of things, and then moved on to the next thing.

Sometimes we admitted that a bet didn't pay off.

Sometimes we just left half-done features sitting there.

And over time, we've done more and more measuring and less and less building. Yes, I'm talking extremes here. It's not like we've done nothing. But we definitely could've been doing a lot more.

Hey balpha! Weren't you going to talk about the "human element"? This is just a rant about product development at every single company in the world.

I'm getting to that. The thing about building new things, making an impact, improving on the status quo, is making bets and taking risks. And that's uncomfortable, because it means that failure has to be an option. And people don't like being uncomfortable, so we rather conduct yet another A/B test instead of saying "We're doing this thing, because we believe it's the right thing. We may be wrong."

How do we get back to a place where we humans are comfortable with taking those risks? By embracing the option of failure. By ensuring that everyone knows that we won't laugh at you or punish you if a reasonable bet doesn't pan out.

In my answer that I mentioned earlier, I also wrote this:

Some people (myself included) are going to be unhappy because those things were important to them. Let's be empathetic with those people, let's allow them their grief, and let's explain to them why we believe we're doing the right thing in order to fulfill that original vision. And let's not do that explaining with a press release and platitudes, but by talking to them eye-to-eye.

Yep, that's vital. A lot of the recent company communication feels like wordsmithed committee-polished PR statements that have every last ounce of humanity removed from them.

And I understand that we're a subsidiary of a publicly traded company and that we have people whose job it is to ensure that we don't accidentally put our foot in our mouth. They want to remove every bit of risk for misunderstanding. That's literally their job, and they're doing it well.

But there must be a middle ground somewhere, where we can actually communicate with the community as humans-to-humans.

From Meta's way of thinking

This isn't just about the company though. It also goes to y'all here on Meta. Knee-jerk "who moved my cheese" complaints are nothing new here, they've existed from day one. I've definitely done my own share of those back in the day.

But there is a line where at-least-somewhat-constructive turns into actively-dehumanizing, like the comment I'm responding to here. And I'm not even calling out that particular commenter -- their comment received 75 upvotes, so clearly they weren't alone.

I mean, yes, we as a company have been making it easy for people to be angry at us. But we're not (only) an amorphous corporate blob, we're also a collection of individual humans, most of whom are amazing people who want to do the right thing.

And if these humans can expect that Meta is just going to s????+?????|????t????? on them if they post anything here, then it's no surprise that fewer and fewer do.

So here's my ask for you, Meta: Absolutely continue to demand that Stack Exchange Inc. DBA Stack Overflow come back to communicating with you at eye level. "Keep community at our center" is one of our publicly stated core values, after all.

But also do your part in bringing back the human element. Both here on Meta itself, and out there on the Stack Exchange network.

My initial instinct when seeing this question was to draw attention to a process/policy that I think most people wouldn't even think about - that an answer being verifiably wrong is not a reason to delete it and it should be downvoted instead.

This has often confused me. I understand the argument - I just don't agree. The primary issue with the argument is that it relies on users actually voting and leaving comments to inform future users that the answer is wrong. Unfortunately, if no one is around to leave those breadcrumbs, the answer is just an answer.

As such, I went searching for data to help show how voting has changed since 2015 but ended up leaning on data I could get without SEDE, like the (all-time) vote history of the 20 highest-volume voters on SO in 2025.

I discovered that only five of the 20 upvote more than they downvote and that, combined, their all-time 1.4 million votes were downvotes 87% of the time. That would be great for my argument except that, 75% of those votes are on questions, with only two of the 20 voting more on answers than questions.

While I know that not all users will follow the patterns of these 20, I wondered - "If the top voters are voting so little on answers -

• Is anyone voting on answers?
• Is the foundation the platform was built on even still sound?
• If people don't vote on answers, is SO even useful?

So, I needed more info. I collected all-time and recent data about both questions and answers and focused far more broadly than score... using on site search. Meaning my info doesn't include deleted stuff. I also chose to only look at open questions and only looked at data through the end of 2024, so nothing was too new to have gotten votes. I'd say it's fair to call my numbers a "best case scenario".

I looked at:

• Are there still more answers than questions? - yes, about 1.3 answers per question.
• What percentage of questions are still getting at least one answer? 55%.
• What percentage of questions get at least two answers? 20%.
  • Well, I guess you don't need to rank answers if 74% of answered recent questions only have one answer.
• Do recent questions ever get lots of answers? Yes - 603 questions from 2022-2024 have 10 or more answers.
  • Fun fact - 3 of those qualify as "Unanswered".
• What percentage of answers have a score of 0 or less? 53%
• Wait... so half of recent non-deleted answers have a score of zero or less? In fact, half have a score of exactly 0. Only 3% of recent answers on SO have a score less than 0.
• Questions are doing better, right? Worse. 63% of recent, non-deleted questions have a score of 0 or less. 55% have a score of 0.

You'd think that - as the person who (literally) brought you the 1 rep to vote concept - I'd have looked at some data to support the necessity of increasing voting on SO, so I'd be talking about stuff I learned in 2023. You would be wrong. If anyone looked at this data, it wasn't shared with me, as far as I can remember.

So, here's most of the info I got from my searches on Stack Overflow -

"Answerable" question data

Here's a comparison of the "answerable"^? question status on Stack Overflow up to the end of 2024 ("All-time") and for 2022 - 2024. Due to the Roomba cleanup that deletes unanswered, zero-score questions after a year, I'll also include info for 2022 - 17 Feb 2024 - labeled "Roomba" in the table.

? - "Answerable" means questions that are not deleted, closed, locked or wikis. There are 24.2 MM total non-deleted questions.
§ - "Answered" and "Unanswered" refer to whether a question has an accepted answer or at least one answer with a score of >0.

It seems like questions are largely faring worse when it comes to getting any answer over the last two years, while getting a "validated" answer is even less likely and relies more on the asker accepting an answer. The likelihood of getting multiple answers is lower as well.

It's important to remember that these numbers only reflect questions that are currently answerable - not all questions that were asked. This table excludes everything the community has already acted on to close and/or delete or that askers have deleted on their own.

Even the "Roomba" column - what I think of as the "best case scenario" - shows the current trajectory isn't looking great, with nearly half of recent "Answerable" questions considered "Unanswered" by the system and 22% having no answers at all.

Answer data

So, now we know how likely a question is to be "Answered" - let's see what the answers look like. Here's their status on Stack Overflow up to the end of 2024 ("All-time") and for 2022-2024. Note, this table includes answers to questions that aren't "Answerable".

Over half of answers created in the last two years have a score of 0 or less - mostly a score of 0. Far fewer answers have a score of two or greater than did in the past. While some of this is likely due to accumulation of votes over time, it certainly calls into question some of the core tenets of the platform.

I don't know how to explain this succinctly - the platform, company, community, and users each have ideas of what this platform is, what it is "supposed" to be, and what it "could" be - but these ideas each seem flawed.

Top voters data

While by no means representative of all voting, here's the voting habits (all time) of the top voters on SO so far in 2025 (as of Feb 12). Note - these numbers do not reflect the makeup of votes cast this year, since that info isn't available. This represents all users who have cast at least 1000 votes in 2025.

The top 20 voters in 2025 fall into a few categories:

• Exclusively upvote - 3 upvote >98% of the time
  • 1 votes <25% on questions, 2 vote 50-75% on questions
• Primarily upvote - 2 upvote 75-80% of the time
  • 2 vote >75% on questions
• Primarily downvote - 9 upvote 2-25% of the time
  • 1 votes 25-50% on questions, 5 vote 50-75% on questions, 3 vote >75% on questions
• Exclusively downvote - 6 upvote <2% of the time
  • 1 votes 50-75% on questions, 5 vote >75% on questions

Overall (all time):

• 1.4 million votes
• 75% question votes
• 87% downvotes
• 21k average reputation, 6.5k median
• 9 years average account age, 10 years median
• The two newest voters (2 months and 1 year) upvote >98% of the time and are the only users with <2k votes.
• The 6 lowest-rep users (<2k) are equally split between primary upvoters and primary downvoters, as are the two highest rep (>100k).

While my interpretation can be debatable and the data is incomplete due to deleted posts, the points I take from this are:

• Despite there being more answers posted per year, the top voters vote on questions more than answers.
• At this volume, primary upvoters tend to be lower reputation but primary downvoters are represented at all reputation levels.

Bigger than wrong answers

So... since I pulled all of this info and it seems to be a "best case scenario"... I've been really trying to figure out how to frame this as an answer to the question. I agree with a lot of the answers already here. I've long championed many of them personally and have collected data and user sentiment about them informally over the years that frequently just ended up living rent-free in my head - what was the use of writing down proposals knowing nothing would ever come of them?

Seeing these numbers is scary and leaves me questioning whether the core design of the platform actually supports the original intention and searching for ideas that would lead to a dramatic shift towards making the platform successful. But I do know that deleting verifiably wrong answers instead of (not) downvoting them isn't going to solve anything.

Is Stack Overflow delivering on its core purpose?

What are we even supposed to be doing anyway?

This platform was established to solve the problem of programmers struggling to find trustworthy solutions to issues they face in a miasma of forums, blogs, and other resources, sometimes behind paywalls. It intended to do that by having a durable library of high-quality questions and answers that anyone could access or contribute to freely. It would be curated and maintained by a community of experts and the content "validated" by voting - which would rank answers to help the best "bubble up" to the top. This is covered in the Tour.

The cake is a lie

And by "cake", I mean the Tour.

Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

Increasingly, people don't get a single answer, let alone multiple answers. While historically less than 15% of questions don't have answers, 25% of questions asked between 2022-2024 don't have an answer. And, while nearly 35% of questions all-time have at least two answers, less than 20% of questions asked between 2022 and 2024 do.

Good answers are voted up and rise to the top.

In actuality, 40% of all answers and 50% of answers in the last two years have a score of 0. Only about 20% of answers all-time have a score of >2 - the same is true of only 10% of answers posted in the last years.

You earn reputation when people vote on your posts

Technically true but with so few posts earning any upvotes, it's unlikely a user will actually earn any reputation to unlock privileges without hitting the jackpot.

Cutting away

At some point, things stopped working as intended - and some may have never worked well. In some cases, things changed - the people, the world, the platform. In other cases, they stayed the same when they needed to change. I appreciate questions like this one because they encourage us to look at the big picture and question the status-quo and identify what is working, what needs to change, and what we think will have the most impact.

We need to stop acting like the platform is OK.

If you can look at the data above and think a few small changes here and there will take the site back to its 2010 glory... please help me understand that. Did you even know - really know - that things were that bad?

Company people - I understand that it's "bad for business" to talk about your tentpole product going down the toilet but you need to stop acting like the site just needs different content types to appeal more to younger users or some minor "pain points" need to be addressed so that people are more willing to ask/answer questions. The recent community product roadmap blog post states:

the Question Assistant helps new askers improve their question and boost the likelihood of getting an answer by 12%.

This isn't even accurate, based on the data shared on MSO. While the "Success rate" increased by 12% - from 40% to 44%, getting an answer only increased by 6% - from 43% to 46%. By relying on a percentage change instead of stating what percentage get answered, you obscure the fact that the answered rate is so terrible in the first place.

This is the thing - the system is failing, which makes it difficult for users to actually find value in the platform and leaves the site looking like a ghost town - further depressing people's interest in participating. It also makes it a bit difficult for y'all to validate any changes being made are actually doing any good - if no one is voting, you kinda can't tell if the post quality got any better.

Start talking about the major platform problems in public - honestly, without marketing lingo to spin it. When you can't acknowledge things are broken and be specific, the community is unlikely to believe that you actually see what's broken. Step back and talk about the whole forest, not just one tree at a time. Present potential solutions you think might address those problems as concepts, not half-built features. Recognize the expertise of users by inviting critique and alternative ideas from the community.

Community people - y'all have been trying to draw attention to many of these issues for years. The answers here show that many things are up for consideration when it comes to restructuring the platform but the responses to the One rep to vote post really woke me up to how difficult it is as a staff member to even have these discussions.

Y'all have really valid and key concerns that even someone like me doesn't always see - that's why the community discussion is so valuable and why it's frustrating to feel unheard. But some of y'all tend to present those concerns as insurmountable or inevitable or couple valid risks with untested assertions of the scale of abuse or damage.

I understand that when things feel inevitable and people feel like they have no control, it's common to overstate or exaggerate arguments for impact in an effort to get someone to hit the brakes. It does work - but only so much. Eventually, people will just start ignoring what's said and dismiss it as hyperbolic. The thing is, with so many individual voices, even if the specific people speaking up against something may vary, it can seem like the community is always using this tactic, causing it to lose impact very quickly.

You don't have to trust the company to work with them. When you respond to staff posts, aim to create the same quality of meta answer that's expected on main sites - complete answers with explanations and supporting documentation. If something shouldn't be done, explain why and give an alternative way to address the issue. Try to understand the goals of the question and feel free to propose a frame challenge. These answers actually give staff things to think about they may not have realized or considered. Thanks to those already doing this!

Stop investing in projects that don't address the core problems

While making it easier for people to write good questions or encouraging people to write answers might make the numbers investors look at go up, they actually add to the problems of the platform. There's too much content to curate and too few people to do it and no tools to support community efforts.

Adding new content types (with minimal or no moderation) will exacerbate that problem and prevent the community from actually addressing it because now they have a new section of the site with minimal moderation tooling that also has to be curated. Banking on people who want to chat in discussions deciding to stick around and answer questions or review is unrealistic.

Fix what's already broken before creating more stuff.

Consider - if people aren't coming here any more, is it really because they want different content types, or is it because they can't actually find the content they need to address their problems? Do you honestly think you'll be able to compete with YouTube, Reddit, Discord, and other existing platforms people are already using?

I don't have all of the solutions - no one person does. That's why this community is such an amazing resource. There needs to be a vision and that needs to be a collaborative effort. If everyone's working towards the same goal, things can come together quickly.

But that requires everyone. I apparently failed to actually state my point (thanks Shadow). Over the last few years, I've seen a widening gulf between the company and the community and a lot of polarization of the amazing people on either side. I know (many of) those people and believe they are kind and capable and honest. I also know they're often stressed and anxious and human - they make mistakes, forget simple things, or rush in without enough information. No one I know actually wants this platform to fail.

As I stated in a comment:

We need to stop seeing the company and the community as effigies of everything that's "bad" about their respective entity as a whole. We need to start thinking beyond their actions and looking to understand the true reasons for them rather than making uncharitable assumptions. That requires being vulnerable and open about things - which isn't easy in the situation we're in. But I don't think that the platform can succeed without us working together to find a way forward unclouded by secrecy and ulterior motives (or the assumptions of them).

Using Stack Overflow as alpha test server.

Instead buy the devs their own private test server where they can play around with experimental features. Instead of constantly disrupting the biggest site in the network with "features", that nobody wants and nobody asked for, let alone applied to be alpha tester for. Without a way to even opt out.

I'm sure there are users who would like to help out with beta testing once there's something mature enough to roll out for beta testing. Let those users do that on this new test server.

The new editor

It is buggy, it is unfinished. Nobody works on it^*. It does not support stuff like snippets. It regularly makes odd choices for how to format stuff.

I understand that a WYSIWYG editor is good UX. But if it works. Right now, it imposed on users in a not-really-working state. I also have no confidence Stack Exchange is the company that will make a good WYSIWYG editor. Maybe see if you can outsource the work. Or use something off the shelf.

I mean, there are few here and there that are OK. When they do not do too much. But the vast majority are abhorrent. I am convinced that when I die and go to hell, my eternal punishment would be forced to use WYSIWYG editors forever.

^* OK, I don't actually keep track. But I know it was not touched for maybe a couple of years. And there was some commit or two recently. But overall, I do not see any ongoing work on the editor to make it actually worth using.

The custom undo of the regular editor

Related, but the regular editor has a custom undo functionality that is bonkers. It almost never undoes what I expect. I might want to undo a word, and it removes a paragraph. Worse yet, often gets "stuck" and you cannot even redo what was undone. You press Ctrl+Z and two sentences disappear. Then you press Ctrl+Y and a sentence and a half appears.

Just drop the entire thing. All browsers support regular undo/redo and have for many years. The awkward implementation used on the sites has been obsolete for quite a while.

The Stack Overflow Blog posts in the sidebar

I am not going to suggest that the whole blog is removed. I will not be against it but still, I just want to focus on the sidebar here.

The blog is largely useless for most people. I certainly remember reading some good articles there but as of the last few years it seems it is mostly various marketing posts. Occasionally it says an articles is sponsored but even for ones that are not often it is a clickbait-y headline and when you visit it says the article is written by the owner of some company that is in the sphere of the title or something.

I feel these just take up space. People interested in the blog can still visit it. People interested in the podcast likely do not need a reminder on the top right that there is a new episode.

Would that lead to less visits? Probably. But I would argue it is probably more beneficial for folks to visit meta posts. We can have a couple more visible instead.

The Peer Pressure badge could probably go.

The purpose of badges is to encourage helpful behaviors. But what helpful behaviors does Peer Pressure encourage?

In order to get this badge in the first place I would have had to have made an answer that is not useful, or a question that does not show any research effort; is unclear or not useful. This is not particularly helpful, and deleting the post afterward might be better than waiting for the community to do the same for you, but generally fixing your post via editing is better than deleting.

And some users consider this the 'badge of shame' because this signals that they made a post at some point that was negatively received and they later deleted. They might not want to have that fact publicly available.

Q&A on metas

I feel the Q&A format is just inherently bad for meta sites. I also want to say that Q&A does not need to be completely gone, but metas can at least be diversified with the type of content. Or maybe we throw out Q&A and adopt another model.

In general, Q&A seems antithetical to metas on principle:

• when metas are used for discussion, a Q&A is very one-sided. There is a proposed topic in the Q, then the As support or oppose it. But there is no discussion. There are comments but it is not enough. If you want to post something substantial related to an answer, you are stuck: multiple comments are probably not sufficient; posting another answer not directly related to a question is a big gamble and often will not work and the answer will be removed; posting an entire new question does not feel discussion-y. It feels like targetting a user. And even then it runs into the same issue as square one - how do you respond to an answer.
• when metas are used for bug reports - a Q&A is an overkill. "Answers" are posted rarely and even when they are, they might try to offer more information, or offer an workaround (presumably temporary), or explain why it is not a bug, or just mention there was a fix. These are all crowbarred into the Q&A format.
• when metas are used for feature requests you get mostly the same situation as bugs. But there are maybe a few more "answers" that might opine on the feature or offer some additional suggestions. Which does not answer anything. Because there was no question to begin with, anyway. The Q&A format is again just barely there as a structure.
• Q&A only really works when asking for support. Because this does match knowledge base style format - "How do I do X on the site" or "Help me with Y" does then elicit an actual response. Having whole articles around how the sites work and how to use them is a good use of Q&A.

Meta sites are just bad at being what they should be right now. Yes, there is huge long history of the metas using the same engine as the main sites but I just think that has been a mistake.

The idea that community resources need to be tightly coupled to the company’s commercial success. We have heard so many times that cutbacks are necessary cause the company has not met its financial goals, and that it’s necessary for survival. Sales are measured in quarters. Communities in years and decades.

It would be good to value continuity over shorter term finances - if a SaaS product is failing, it’s not a direct result of community resources such as community managers and devs failing.

In a sense it feels like the public platform, staff working on it and users are penalised for things out of our hands - and the decline of the network can directly by attributed to that.

And as a resource that was meant for developers by developers, SE would do well to avoid the anti pattern of arbitrary mass redundancies that seem in vogue right now.

This can seem very provocative but I guess this is the place for it: Management of the company thinking about the community as part of the product probably causes a big part of the friction between the community and the company and why some people don't like the sites any more.

In the past, it seems like there were features pushed by the upper management of your company that didn't fit the community. This includes you integrating LLM features but I think it isn't exclusive to that.

The current (upper) management of SE Inc. does not seem to care about the public platform and the community any more than it is a product giving them attention to promote your products (e.g. Stack Overflow for Teams) or talk about it in presentations.

When I think about your company's management and its actions, I have to think about the AI features (including whatever Overflow AI and Overflow API is), the data dump changes, the layoffs impacting CMs that actually have connections with the community and generally not much understanding of the community.

Speaking of the layoffs, how many community managers that have a deep understanding and some connection to the community are left, except you? Are there CMs coming from the community?

I am sure that you (CMs in general but specifically Slate) want the best for the community but you might only have limited power to make changes needed we (the community) need. If your upper management requests something, you are the ones conveying the bad message but is there a reasonable option to tell them why it's a bad idea? If this is an option, have there been cases where CMs have internally stood up for the community to tell management why something shouldn't be done? You (and at least some if not most of the devs) know the community better than management so are the only ones with the capability of telling management about the impact of their choices. Do you feel like you are actually representing the community in the company?

I can understand that SE Inc. is a profit-oriented company but it is heavily dependent on the community. Is your (CMs) voice heard in the company if necessary?

If a decision impacting the platform is made, the Community Managers should at least be part of that decision-making process.

I don't expect you to be able to answer these questions but I want you to think about it.

Many of the exceptions and special behaviours of various systems that can be unexpected and surprising. For example

• automatic downvotes for spam flags
• rep penalty for spam flags
• hiding posts on homepage (but not /questions) below a specific score
• auto-removal of greetings or signatures in posts
• blocks or automatic rewriting of certain patterns in question titles
• automatic conversion of "trivial" answers to comments
• ...

There are more of these that I can't think of right now. There's really a lot of tiny quirks all over the Q&A platform.

Most of them have some reasons why they were implemented. Those reasons might not even be bad ones. But in aggregate I don't think those reasons justify the added complexity and confusion these systems cause.

There are so many different quirks of the platform that it's almost impossible to understand and know them all. That is not a good thing.

Per-site privileges / Association Bonus++

Cut away per-site privileges or largely grant the top privileges to users who are already trusted on other sites in the network (based on rep, good flags, accepted edits, whatever).

There are large clusters of sites where the topics and norms are 99% shared. Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Different, Web Apps, Server Fault, etc.

This has been lightly discussed before by staff:

You make a good point, and having more of an intrinsic connection between the different sites on the network (especially the tech sites like the ones that you list which are so closely related) is definitely one of the areas that we have earmarked for further exploration and discovery in the coming months. – Yaakov Ellis - Staff - Mod - June 2020

Based on your particular question, the search engine might drop you into any of those big tech sites. We grant new accounts the Association Bonus because it would be annoying and onerous not to be able to comment or vote. But a proven, experienced user on Super User will also have absolutely no problem interacting on Web Apps. We should trust them to make edits and submit flags.

However, it's a huge, multi-year project for a new account to get up to 500, 2k, 10k rep on a new site. Years later, it's now even harder to do so as the easy/viral questions have largely already been asked.

We're requiring someone who is a star curator or moderator on Site X to go through this multi-year process in order to make good edits on Site Y or access the moderator tools. We have a proven pool of GREAT curators that we don't invite to work on all of the sites.

In 2009, people were saying things like:

Each site deals with its own specific niche. If you're trusted on one site there's no reason you should be given benefit of the doubt about your knowledge on other topics. If you're skilled in different areas you should be able to gain rep on all 3 sites. If you're not, users shouldn't be given the impression that you are.

and that attitude has largely gone unquestioned in the decades since. I don't think it's true at all, and it's certainly never been tested or backed up with data.

I know absolutely nothing about COBOL but Stack Overflow allows me to make no-review edits and flags on questions with that tag. The site hasn't been damaged.

Allow trusted users on Super User to make edits on Server Fault. See what happens.

The FAQs don't work

In the comments

[emphasis in bold mine]

If a huge social reorg is on the table, we should also ditch 89.2% of all the help and meta FAQs laying out the thousand little guidelines someone has to know to do things correctly. The learning curve is far too steep for new users and pointing them at all that text and being annoyed they didn't read and understand it all before dipping their toe in is inhumane. Almost everyone learns SE by interacting with people […] @ColleenV
_{Commented Feb 13 at 21:54}

The answers are verbose, they're boring, they include painstaking detail. All of the answers to the FAQs have been extensively revised and rewritten so many times that they have lost the spontaneity–and in some cases–the friendly tone they originally possessed.

For example, this FAQ answer dated September 1, 2010:

What does it mean to lock a post?

A question or answer which is locked can no longer be edited, voted or commented upon, closed or re-opened. If a question is locked, new answers cannot be added to that question. Any of the (unlocked) answers can still be edited and voted upon. Locked posts can later be unlocked by moderators.

Who can lock a post?

Only diamond moderators can lock or unlock posts.

When should a post be locked?

Posts should generally only be locked in cases where the ongoing updates and edits are actively detrimental to the system.
For example:

• A question where repeated voting or editing is happening in a way which games or hacks the system.

• A question that gets opened and closed repeatedly many times without achieving community consensus on whether it should stay open or closed.

• A question that, for whatever reason, continues to attract flame posts.

That is what the answer looked like on its fifth edit. It had a total of 155 words.

Today, the answer to What is a "locked" post? has around 1,000 words and has been edited a total of 44 times

Here's another example, the answer to the question: How do comment @replies work?

Today the answer has approximately 1,398 words and has been edited 97 times. It contains 16 bullet points, and a detailed list

Some examples of supported notifications:

• @name some text
• @name: some text
• @name. Some text
• @name, some text
• some text, @name
• some text, @name, more text
• Some text, @name.
• This is mentioned in @name's comment.
• @P. for both P. Smith and P. Jones (whoever commented most recently), but not P.Smith nor P.Jones. Likewise, @P. Smith is handled as @P., so also matches P. Smith or P. Jones.
• @psm or @psmith for P Smith
• @peters or @peterj for Peter Smith or Peter Jones respectively
• @name...

Examples that will not trigger notifications:

• abc@name
• *@name*
• *@name:*
• [@name](http://some-url)
• @[name](http://some-url)
• @P Smith

On January 10, 2011 at 13:31, the 21st revision had 487 words and eleven rules.
The last rule was:

11. The notification must begin with a space or be at the start of the comment. For example, you cannot use markup such as italics. (See comments.)

The 22nd edit, dated Jan 10, 2011 at 14:49 introduced this list:

• works:
  - @name some text
  - @name: some text
  - @name, some text
  - some text, @name
  - some text, @name, more text
  • fails:
    - abc@name
    - *@name*
    - *@name:*

The first time I wanted to notify a user, I looked at how users were addressed and figured out the @ was needed, then I noticed usernames in comments had no spaces. That was all I needed to know.

However, I have explained endless times to new users that they need to use the @ symbol plus the person's username if they want to talk to a user in the comments, and then I'd give an example e.g. @ColleenV. I have never, ever, added a link to that specific FAQ.

Can you imagine the first impact, the sheer bewilderment?

Another example, the answer to: How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion? That specific answer has been edited 174 times and is approximately 4,350 words long. But on October 6, 2018 the 97th version was about 2,200 words long. What happened between 2018 and 2024 that the FAQ answer needed an extra 2,000 words?

The Faqs don't work. They are there for the geeks and nerds, of whom there are many, but surely intimidating for newcomers and ordinary folk.

The -2 reputation penalty for receiving downvotes (the -1 for casting downvotes would have to be adjusted as well).

Reputation is a fundamentally flawed concept. It doesn't mean anything except serve as a rough indicator of how much someone participated on the site. It especially doesn't say anything about how much you know or how useful your posts are.

But even though these are meaningless internet points, people get really upset when someone takes away some of those points. The -2 reputation penalty does exactly that, it takes away a few meaningless internet points. But it doesn't really take away enough of them to seriously affect reputation, just enough to annoy and offend people.

The part that matters is vote scores. I mean they are also very flawed and heavily distorted by attention. But they are often useful to put the better answers at the top and the worse ones at the bottom, most of the time. The rep penalty doesn't affect this part, is just doesn't play any important role in the entire mechanism.

Complexity for the sake of simplicity.

I've been on SE a very long time. The rules and culture did get built up over time and I've lived through it - but sometimes I feel that the 'low friction, and let people work it out' approach had its advantages.

I get the desire to make it easier to get started, but sometimes I wonder if people might do with less training wheels and clutter

In some cases - like the help pages, its too much for someone just getting started, We used to manage with one page. In others - letting people opt out of say the question wizard might be good.

Basically, pondering what would be a minimal viable product today would be an interesting experiment

I do not know how controversial this answer will be, but you asked, so here goes.

I find that the daily rep cap is not really useful. Your reputation should be an indicator of how much you participated in the site - what does it matter if you went on a massive answering spree in one day versus spread them out over many days? The amount of people you helped would be the same, so your reputation increase sould be the same.

Arguably some people just get lucky and post a question that just goes viral or something, or was around long enough to post an 'easy' answer to an 'easy' question in the early stages of the site. You could have posted one absolute banger of a question in 2009 and have moderator tools now even if you have zero experience curating. In this case, a 'per post' rep cap would be more helpful than a 'per day' rep cap.

I'm thinking about what made me want to start participating on Stack Overflow, and then later, the rest of the network. Part of it was wanting to give back to a site that gave me so much (I can squarely attribute my success in my job as a software developer at least in part to Stack Overflow), but another part of it was much more interesting, and one that would be singularly impossible to remove, but one that I think is worth considering:

Reputation. Let's consider putting that on the chopping block.

Ah, reputation. The payment system for a job well done, a question well-sourced, an accurate answer, or a suggested edit well-written. Everything contributory you do to the site pays you back if others think it helpful. This is the heart and soul of what made, and continues to make, Stack Exchange users want to help out. We've tied our content rating system, voting, to it. Privileges are tied to them, so how much you can "play" with the site is determined by how much (and how well) you've contributed. We use it as a trust metric, an incentive, and for some it's what they're known for.

And yet, as we've talked about many times, it's broken in a hundred different ways, wears far too many hats, and for some, it doesn't go far enough. I wrote my own answer to that question that dove into reputation as a system and, looking back, I don't think I looked at just how difficult changing this system would be. Seriously, I don't think we've touched this system since we increased rep from upvotes on questions to +10 again, and that had plenty of criticism on its own. And for good reason!

If you change this system in any way that feels good for new users (equating "more rep" = "feels good" here) e.g. letting anyone upvote, you instantly break the trust factor that reputation stands for. If you start divorcing privileges from reputation like I advocated for in my answer previously, you tread upon the old and sacred ground that reputation has held since the site's inception. The ability to do the "big" things like vote to close and see deleted content are gated behind very high levels of reputation for a reason: They're powerful and if used improperly can cause problems.

This system is brittle yet strong at the same time. It's tied this network together for this long, and yet it's got all of these identifiable problems that we just can't surmount.

In some ways I can see why reputation hasn't really been touched in a long time, because it's so darn hard to get right. The more I think about it, the more this system hamstrings progress, but wow, would it be impossible to remove.

Gamification introduces problems

I'll be brief here, because I don't want to steal anyone else's spotlight. Reputation encourages inauthentic engagement. From the FGITW problem, to voting fraud (what a massive topic that is, by the way), to answering obvious-duplicates, plagiarism, answering a sock's question with an answer of your own, copy-pasting a GPT answer, posting here on Meta with an answer that you know will be popular but may not necessarily be the right thing to say...

The system that pays you will entice you to try and get paid with minimal work. I mean, how much work have moderators and staff had to deal with because of inauthentic voting and posting? Don't answer that. Just... Chew on it for a second. It's probably far bigger than I realize, and I'm (un)lucky enough to get an idea of how it looks from the moderator side of things.

Further, reputation just feels bad for someone who doesn't yet "get" the network. If your posts get downvoted, you feel like you're going backwards before you've even began (no matter that you can't go below 1 reputation). You feel like everyone else is a "moderator" because they have these tools that you don't and their "points" are so high.

But what's the cost of ripping it out?

Everything. Quite literally. The network was built upon the bedrock of reputation and the voting system. It was built upon the concept of "Moderated by you" and how "you" can be determined as being trustworthy is how much you're willing to contribute and how useful others find your contributions. If it disappeared tomorrow, so too would so many users who like the gamification aspect.

I can't possibly fathom a reliable replacement that serves as even a handful of the responsibilities that reputation has. A good start would be relieving reputation of at least some of those responsibilities, and see where that lands. Privileges were my first thought, but this kind of work is impossibly large when you're dealing with something as core as the reputation system, and it's impossible to get right the first (or second, or third, or fourth) try.

But maybe, just maybe, an imperfect solution is better than letting an imperfect system hamstring us from progress.

The amount of flags needed to delete spam, is what we should cut away down.

spam is a big, and ever-rising issue among the network, as many well taken questions trying to deal with it indicate.

Currently, 4 spam flags are needed to delete a post. As proposed on SuperUser, I think that we should reduce the amount of spam flags needed to delete a post down to 3 — network-wide.

Who agrees?

^{If this answer is taken well, I will consider making an official feature-request.}

The use of "legitimate interests" must be halted.

Why?

1. The usage of "legitimate interests" in the context of SE doing is in conflict with GDPR Recital 47, as the usage is not within reasonable expectation of a user of the SE network.

2. SEs has failed to demonstrate, as required, how each claimed "legitimate interest" meets the company's legitimate interests.

3. The design of the consent dialogue is a dark pattern as it is easier to allow the usage of "legitimate interest" than it is to object to them, as pointed out:

[...] to deactivate "legitimate interests" cookies one has to click five separate buttons among two sub-menus:

• Perfomance Cookies
  • Develop and improve services
  • Measure content performance
  • Measure advertising performance
• Targeting Cookies
  • Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources
  • Use limited data to select advertising

The act hiding of the objection in obscure sub-menus is quite dubious, I offered a solution(2025-08-07), but nothing came of it.

4. SE's argument for the usage of "legitimate interests" is based on the compliance with "Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) EU 2.2". While that sounds official and important, the IAB is just a US based trade association. The IAB is NOT an official institution and it's TCF is NOT legally binding. In fact, the legality of the TCFs implementation has been called into question.

As per the many links, you can see this is not the first time the topic has been brought up. Suprisingly there is no movement (on the company's side) to be seen, despite this being a legal issue, which usually rings all sort of alarm bells for companies.

I will just reiterate what I suggested on the previous question since it more or less covered the same ground.

Remove Reputation

Instead of reputation, show a user's "score", with a min of 0. If they have received a net of 60 upvotes, their "reputation" is 60, not 600 + bounties + accepted answers + approved suggested edits.

The goal of this change is to demystify reputation and eliminate the rep cap. It equalizes the value of upvotes vs downvotes so that you can't overall have a negative record of participation while still having an overwhelmingly positive reputation due to the 10rep vs -2rep imbalance.

This is probably the most controversial removal/change I'm suggesting here, and doesn't necessarily only have positives. For example, there's probably users out there who, today, have 1000ish rep that will have far less than a 100 score after this change, because their contributions on average haven't been positive or came from suggested edits being approved. It also renders the bounty system moot... which is a positive in my opinion, but I know a lot of people like the ability to make and earn bounties.

(It would also require a new privilege system... but I cover that next)

Alternatively to using score, just focus solely on how "helpful" the user's contributions have been by making the user's "reputation" be equal to the number of upvotes they've received, possibly even having a secondary stat of how many accepted answers they have. This would require some other visible stat users can easily find to explain why they are question banned when they are, though that should probably exist regardless.

Remove the current rep based privilege system and replace it.

Replace it with a sliding scale system based on how effective the user uses the given privilege. For example, at the start all of your edits should be suggested edits and users should be limited to a certain number of suggested edits per day. Let's make it 50 for arguments sake, though none of these numbers should be taken as well thought out final numbers. Then, for every 20 suggested edits you have approved, you gain 10 edits that you can make per day without it reaching the suggested edit queue. If you go past your per day limit, the rest of your edits go into suggested edits. Cap it at some reasonable number.

This style of throttling allows users who frequently use a given privilege to gain the ability to use it more effectively over time as they prove their ability to use it properly, while keeping users who use it sparingly in the "suggested edit" phase of the throttle regardless of how many good answers they've posted until they've actually proven they can use it effectively.

Remove/Replace the current UX for displaying a post's score and accepted state.

Currently the most prominent thing we display for a question or answer is its score, this puts far more emphasis on the score and leads people to be bothered by it being positive or negative far more than they should be. The reason its prominent is to show users just how "useful" a given post is compared to the rest, however, the sorting of posts already does this. I think we'd be better off if we instead gave more context to voting by displaying them in the form of "X Users found this helpful" and "Y users found issues with this answer" below the question or answer. For questions specifically, this can be modified do "X users also had this question" and "Y users think this question is unclear or poorly researched".

I think this would be a useful change because it wouldn't necessarily change the meaning or power of voting, but it would change the perception of voting. It would give users a clear indication of whether or not a post has problems, and whether or not a post has been found helpful, regardless of the magnitude of either.

You're asking for the hatchet. I give you the hatchet. :)

One way to approach it would be to envision the minimum viable product that fulfills most of the core mission and everything else that we have but wouldn't be contained in such a minimal version is bonus/convenience/clutter and could be cut away with inflicting maybe not too much pain.

How would such a product look like? Like if I would have only one million dollar budget but would need to start from the scratch, what would I do?

For me, the core mission was always building a knowledge library in Q&A style by human collaboration. However, others will emphasize the live help desk aspects instead and will arrive at different conclusions. And it's never only the knowledge generation, it's also always about retrieving it.

For all this we need: a place for people to ask their questions, an asking ground, where only answerable and not yet answered questions leave, and a place for people to answer questions, an answering ground, where people submit and vote on answers; a way to interconnect different Q&A (tags, related, ...) and a landing page with a powerful search function and some form of self-government (elected moderators, some space for discussions) and finally a way to measure trust in people. Think about it as more like going towards Wikipedia but still Q&A focused and still with competing answers.

Technically we need user accounts, content editors, comments, flagging, discussions, thresholds, voting (up and down). To even add something: more ways to structure the knowledge like different content types, sub-categories, ways to describe outdated knowledge, ...

Maybe one could adapt existing content management software systems like for example Mediawiki for this.

Everything else can go. In particular: reputation, badges, printing author names below content (maybe use the MIT or Public domain license instead of CC), votes on questions, accepting answers, jobs, collectives, AI, special designs for each site, specialized sites (just tie privileges to tag groups), upper management's blog posts, ... ;)

Research requirement for questions or downvotes could in principle go, but I have a bad feeling about this, I would actually keep them at any costs. And of course data dumps. They should never ever be cut away.